Clone any website — what a clone can and cannot include
Clone" promises more than any tool delivers. Here is the part of a website that genuinely clones, the part that never will, and how to tell which you need.
"Copy" sets expectations about a page. "Clone" sets expectations about a system — and that is where people get disappointed, because the system is not on the wire.
What a clone actually contains
Front end, fully: markup structure, computed styles, fonts, images and SVG, media, the settled state of animations, the exact layout at the viewport you captured. This is genuinely clonable and, with in-browser capture, clonable to within a pixel or two — our benchmark averages 98.87% against the live page with the origin blocked.
Back end, not at all: server code, database contents, admin panels, cron jobs, payment integrations, email flows, user accounts, search indexes, API keys. None of it was ever sent to your browser. A "cloned" contact form will render perfectly and submit to nowhere.
If your goal needs the second list, no tool solves it and the honest path is to rebuild the functionality yourself — with the captured front end as your specification, which is a real head start.
Clone one page or clone a site?
- One page is a capture: open it, capture it, export it. Highest fidelity because everything is already rendered in front of you.
- A whole site is a crawl: enumerate URLs, visit each, capture each, then rewrite the internal links so the local copy is browsable. Slower, and the failure modes are different — pagination, infinite scroll, URL parameters, and pages that only exist behind a form.
The extension does both; whole-site runs are bounded by a page limit and per-host pacing so you do not hammer the source. For static sites wget -m -p -k is still a perfectly good free answer — see download an entire website and our wget comparison.
Testing a clone properly
Block the original domain, then open your clone. Broken images mean assets are still hotlinked; different fonts mean @font-face never resolved locally; shifted layout means a stylesheet or a custom property did not survive.
That is the test our benchmark automates, and it is why the remote-request count sits next to the fidelity score: monolith leaves 365 requests pointed at the original site and wget 554, so both look better online than they are. Reproduce it with npm run bench:rivals from the source.
Cloning something you own
The most common legitimate reason to clone is a migration: moving your own site off a builder you are done paying for, or lifting a staging design into a new CMS. That works well, and the WordPress export exists for exactly this — see copy any website to WordPress. Expect to reconnect forms, analytics and anything dynamic by hand; those are configuration, not markup.
Cloning somebody else's site to publish as your own is infringement, and their logo is a trademark on top of that. Is it legal to copy a website walks through the distinction, including the cases — archiving, evidence, research, reference — where copying is entirely normal.
FAQ
Can you clone any website?
You can clone any page's rendered front end if you can open the page. You cannot clone the server, database, or admin side, so a clone is a faithful static reproduction rather than a working duplicate of the business.
How do I clone a website for free?
wget -m -p -k for static sites, SingleFile or CopyAnySite's free key for modern client-rendered pages. Compare the measured results in copy any website free.
Will a cloned site's forms and login work?
No. They will render and validate client-side, then have nowhere to submit. Reconnecting them to your own backend is a build step, not a copy step.
Is cloning a website legal?
Making a copy for offline reading, archiving, evidence or reference is generally fine; republishing someone else's site or content as your own is not, and trademarks apply to their marks regardless.
What is the difference between cloning and copying a website?
Nothing technical — but "clone" implies the whole system, which no capture tool provides. Both, in practice, mean reproducing what the browser rendered.
Try it on the page you are looking at
CopyAnySite is a Chrome extension: open any page you can reach, press capture, and take away a standalone HTML file, an editable WordPress page, or a kit a coding agent can build from. The free key needs no card.
Download CopyAnySite